Our Comic-Con Mea Culpa

The somewhat elaborate Cardboard Tube Samurai adventure that we wrote is, if not impossible, certainly improbable from the laptop - unfortunately, this took hours to figure out. It’s something that we’ll do properly on Wednesday and Friday - for the time being, here are our twoofferings as a conciliatory gesture. It turns out that my hotel does have Internet, and it’s free, even - but that support is extremely porous. Indeed, it only appears to function properly in a five by five area, easily discernable by the dog pile of geeks all trying to get five bars of wireless signal.

Some details might be in order, though - for example, before this convention, I was not aware that there was a person - Rob Liefeld - who was famous simply for sucking to a great degree. By that calculation, I should be famous for the hundreds of things I’m miserable at. Also, mothers continue to bring their young children to us for sketches when they have absolutely no idea what it is we do, and when they say he can draw whatever he wants, he invariably draws the Fruit Fucker. This doesn’t really work out that well for us. When he draws the Fucker itself, everything is okay - it’s just kind of an odd robot, his protrusion on the front need not necessarily be a steel phallus. When he adds the ravaged fruit and the accompanying puddle of juice, juice also dripping from his chrome shaft, it becomes more difficult for me to explain.

There is a mystifying mural in the D Concourse of my airport that always fills me with unease. It concerns some vaguely arcane theme, at least, I think it does, but one gets the impression that there are meanings and layers of meaning which lurk at the periphery of awareness.

Beginning at one end of the walkway, a strange narrative surges with aggressive determination, hurtling toward a twist ending that will leave you breathless. A parlor magician and his credulous hobgoblin assistant direct our eyes toward their magical equipment, which looks like a an abandoned miniature espresso stand. Their faces have a pallid, greasy cast and their bone structure is blatant to the point of being ghoulish. The implications are obvious. They are magical ghouls, and you will watch their magic show or be destroyed.

They close the hatch on their espresso stand, which initially makes it look like a spectacular, polychromatic Ho ho. Soon, it resembled a burrito made from the guts of broken kaleidoscopes rolling around on an audio/visual cart. One can only imagine how difficult it was to move their surreal food before. For the next two hundred feet of wallspace, they spin the cart around and around with singleminded purpose, occasionally glancing at the viewer in a threatening way. I’ve never had the courage to break eye contact with these fiends, as the latent violence of their expression has always produced the necessary stamina.

When the suspense can no longer be borne, the burrito is breached to reveal a hermaphrodite. I don’t know if burritos are their larval stage, or what. I have no idea what the fuck it is doing in there. Honestly, the magicians seemed a little surprised too, but they can’t make it look like the contents of their own Goddamn burrito were somehow unknown to them. It begs the question - was he always in there? Can hermaphrodites turn invisible? Have we thus far underestimated the hermaphrodite threat?